This invention relates to providing periodic signals and, more particularly, to mitigating phase/period jitter in periodic signals.
Existing technological applications use periodic signals for various purposes, such as timing or modulation. An ideal periodic signal includes a basic waveform (sometimes called a characteristic waveform) that is repeated cyclically, where each instance of the basic waveform is called a “cycle.” It is well known that in an ideal periodic signal the amount of time spanned by each cycle is the same and is called a period. Additionally, the number of cycles per second is called frequency.
Periodic signals used in existing technologies generally must be generated. In reality, these generated periodic signals may be non-ideal at least because some cycles may be longer or shorter than they ideally should be. In other words, the “period” of the periodic signal does not stay the same and may vary from cycle to cycle. This variation is often called “period jitter” or “phase jitter.” For convenience, the term phase jitter will be used from this point on to this phenomenon.
Phase jitter may cause undesirable effects in technological applications. For example, when a periodic signal is used to time particular operations, phase jitter may cause the operations to be mis-timed and may cause the operations to fail. Therefore, decreasing phase jitter may be important. Accordingly, there is continued interest in developing systems and methods for decreasing phase jitter in periodic signals.